Telephone network operators or access providers fall in to two broad categories, local operators and long distance (LD) operators. Local access providers, typically referred to as local exchange carriers (LEC), are confined to a well defined local operating space known as a local access transport area (LATA). Within a given LATA, a local telephone company provides two main types of service, local-to-local service and local-to-long distance service. Combined facilities within a local network, used to provide access to long distance carriers, are commonly referred to as an access network. Long distance carriers access their customers by way of this local carrier-provided access network. The point of demarcation between local and long distance networks is commonly called an entrance facility. An entrance facility can exist at either the local wire center, or at a long distance point of presence (POP). An entrance facility hand-off occurring at a long distance POP is referred to as a LEC path entrance, while a hand-off at the LEC wire center is called collocation entrance. Leasing of capacity on local access networks is based on a complex tariff-based pricing model. This pricing model varies slightly from carrier to carrier, but conforms to a set of generally applied rules across all LATAs and carriers. All access network services are categorized into individual components called rate elements. Optimization and management of LEC path and collocation entrance facilities, and their associated rate elements, has traditionally been accomplished by way of a highly stepwise, spreadsheet-based manual processes.
Access transport management systems provide network engineers with core functionality to manage a nationwide access network (e.g., a telecommunications network). Access transport management systems automate the process of identifying local exchange carrier (LEC) and competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) access circuits that have sub-optimal routes, and moving such circuits to less costly routes and/or facilities. Access transport management systems may include sets of procedures that conform to user-defined business logic. Depending on given optimization parameters, access transport management systems may execute a suitable set of procedures against each circuit in order to determine cost-saving opportunities. For example, in the case of digital signal 1 (DS1) line optimization, access transport management systems may use entrance facility (e.g., an entrance to a building for both public and private network service cables, including antenna transmission lines) spares to discover zero-mile digital signal 3 (DS3) lines, subtending DS1 lines (e.g., subtending allows a node to feed traffic to another node upstream), and/or swinging DS1 lines.
However, such an approach is a local search heuristic that provides only local optima (e.g., local minimal access transport costs and/or maximum cost savings). In other words, access transport management systems fail to guarantee global optima for access networks, and circuit moves suggested by access transport management systems may still be sub-optimal.